Journal Article

Negative Dialectics in John Updike's Terrorist'

Mabrouk, Alia Abbas Mohammed Hassan

2024

Overview

Widely acknowledged as one of the best narratives that depict the atrocities of 9/11 in America, Updike's Terrorist has been tackled as the magnum opus that embodies cultural hegemony, the life of Muslim Americans as an ethnic minority in America, and how they interact with the forms of oppression practiced against them. A scrutinizing look, however, at the text in terms of being a discursive formation initiates a process of a textual analysis that transcends the binary oppositions of the oppressor and the oppressed, the dominant culture and the marginalized one, and casts light on the epistemic fabric that shapes the linguistic input of the text. The aim of the present paper is to explore the hidden enunciative function that endows different signs with all their possible interpretations, and that ultimately determines how discursive analysis to be carried out in the research points out how the experience of terrorism, and the sophisticated process of identity formation should be deterritorialized. Interacting within the space of the text, terrorism as a political and a human phenomenon, and identity formation as a highly complex and incessant process, feed the discourses of politics, history, and religion, and are mutually determined by them. The research explores, with no a priori assumptions, the interstitial space in which terrorism, identity formation, and the discourses of history, politics, and religion interact and overlap. It also makes use of new historicism as the critical approach that envelopes the argument presented, and that can. due to its revolutionary assumptions, reveal how politics, religion, and history function as negative dialectics in a way that allows the reader to reason phenomena without being victimized by fixed points of reference, reductionist binary oppositions, or ambiguous elementary propositions.

• Publisher: جامعة القاهرة - فرع الخرطوم - كلية الآداب
• Subject: الجدل السلبي / الخطاب الديني / الهوية السياسية / ظاهرة الإرهاب